


Salt

by fluorescentgrey



Series: Empire Building [6]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - America, Alternate Universe - Farm/Ranch, Alternate Universe - Historical, Dust Bowl, Dustbowl AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-04
Updated: 2017-02-04
Packaged: 2018-09-21 21:34:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9567704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: Pixley, California, 1935. There was nothing (nothing and again nothing) so they left.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mayamar](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayamar/gifts).



There was nothing (nothing and again nothing) so they left. The dust in the corners of all the rooms was thin and red like a kind of powdered atavistic blood. For weeks they had not spoken and had been hungry. They ate once or twice a day porridge or bread with sugar poured on it. On Sunday Lily had gone to Amarillo and called James from the payphone at the gas station and Remus had sat in the car and had a cigarette and watched her cover her face with her hand. The cheap ring she wore caught a spark of sunlight. Across the street they were all getting out of church and the bells ringing echoed in the wild stillness. Then they drove home again. 

“What are we going to do? Are we going to go to California?” 

There was nothing to do in California. But neither was there anything to do in Dallam County Texas in April 1935. You could stand out in the ankle-deep dust soft as cotton and so empty and watch the black clouds rolling from the North, reaching across the plain like strange alien hands. Like some final consumptive cough sucking the world under. They would go inside and tie wet cloths over their faces and jam the draughts in the doors and windows with towels and sheets and they would sit at the table watching it through the smeared glass drinking whiskey from the bottle because they had sold their dishware. And after not so very long in the false swarming darkness like an apocalyptic cloud of locusts you could see neither the wreckage of the barn nor the wreckage of the old wagon wheel irrigator nor the wreckage of any of the rest of it. Not any of the wreckage at all. Only the darkness. 

They had had goats and chickens they had sold or who had died. And at the next plot over their new baby died of dust pneumonia and their eldest was weak and bruised with malnutrition, and their father drank himself silly every night and sometimes near dawn across the great flat silent utterly but for the scouring wind Remus and Lily could hear him firing his shotgun aimlessly into the bloody sky. 

\--

They had grown up in Tulsa at the wellspring of Route 66 and had known each other since they were children, and to most of their peers it was obvious their marriage was a sham. It had been in a rush in the summer of 1932; they were seventeen, Lily had cried, though not for the reasons one might think, and in the photographs relegated to gold-plated frames in the families’ respective Owen Park houses Remus looked rather like he’d recently been hit over the head with something heavy. Lily was wearing her mother’s wedding dress, and they were holding hands with a white-knuckled desperation, the way people who had been shipwrecked did. Remus and James had pooled their scant savings to buy Lily’s ring and James had picked it out at a department store downtown while Remus watched the salespeople watch him with bare-faced distrust. It had been eleven years since Greenwood had burned and they still didn’t trust black boys. 

Lily had the baby in another seven months and not so very long after under cover of darkness she and Remus took the car and drove through the night all the way across the state and across North Texas in the haunting stillness listening to peppy big band music on the radio whose stations Lily filtered through compulsively. They did not speak. When they had left Tulsa Lily’s family had waved goodbye from the stoop all the women waving their white handkerchiefs like surrender flags as her eldest sister held in her arms Lily and James’s small and wailing son, whom the Evanses subsequently attempted, without much success, to pass off as a foundling. As though to say, in the manner of any surrender, now you have done something so reproachful we have no choice but to give up. You have defeated us and left us with nothing. It was indeed true that the Evanses would never really be looked at the same way again and indeed before long most of them would scatter to Kansas City and Shreveport and all the daughters would marry mostly for the purpose of changing their surname. 

Meanwhile Remus for his part had also married in attempt to diffuse scandal but as there was no physical evidence in the form of a mixed-race child his father still went about his business as one of the great Tulsa oilmen with little more than a few knowing looks from underlings who were swiftly fired. People believed the whispers they had heard for a while but then they saw the wedding photographs of Remus and Lily that Remus’s father kept on his desk and they moved onto other things, as people in Tulsa tended to. They read the local paper and a few got dispatches from Dallas or Oklahoma City and eventually it became clear things were already unfolding such that gossip seemed particularly trivial. 

At dawn on a cold day, March 1933, they arrived at the plot of land outside Dalhart which had been owned by the Lupins since Remus’s father’s earliest days purchasing potentially oil-bearing Texas land for dirt cheap. The deposits were too deep to dig with the technology he’d had access to early in the ‘20s and as such he had let the land to homesteaders who three months previous had taken whatever augury and portents and moved on to California. Inside the ledger was still out on the kitchen table and the bed was made and there was dry wood stacked by the stove as though they had left in an almighty hurry; it was all so eerie that for weeks neither Remus nor Lily could stand to be in the house alone. 

\--

Most of what they owned could be parted with but they still needed rope to tie the necessities to the roof of the car and they needed gas to get out of Texas. They went to Amarillo and tried to sell the table and chairs to no avail. 

“Help me find a rich oilman who’ll pay me for a blowjob,” said Remus. Lily laughed her huge unladylike cackle sort of laugh which had been rare since they had left Tulsa and rarer still since things had started to go very bad. “I’m serious,” Remus said, but he was grinning. 

“It sounds like an elicit novel,” said Lily. They were sitting on the hood of the car parked along the main drag having a cigarette. The storm that had come through three nights previous had filled the streets with heaps of red dust like strange hellish snow. “Desperate young couple willing to do _anything_ to get out of Dallam County…” 

“Put that on a sign in the rear window.” 

In the end they could find no oilmen (hardly anyone was left in Amarillo anymore) and so they sold the set of encyclopedias James had given them as a wedding present which to this point they had held onto because James had spent everything he had left after the ring buying them. And because he had written on the first page of the first volume _To L and R the great loves of my life on the occasion of your marriage. Many happy returns to you and may you get your kicks wherever you may find them. Thank you, and I love you, James F. Potter, Greenwood, Tulsa, August 1932._ But the set was worthless without the first volume and the pawnshop owner who by this point knew Remus and Lily by name (“Mr. and Mrs. Lupin;” it gave Remus a funny uncomfortable chill) told them he couldn’t give them quite as much for it if they tore the first page out. Nevermind the pages were full of dust. The pawnshop owner was the only person making a living in Amarillo those days and he knew it. He had come to keep the shotgun that was usually under the desk on top of the desk, and he had lost an eye in the Great War so they knew he knew how to use it. 

Lily had written a letter to James she mailed at the Post Office, and then trying very hard to make no ceremony about it they got in the car and drove Southwest toward Route 66. They were saving Lily’s ring to pawn in case they got to California and there was nothing to do. They hadn’t spoken about it but Remus was certain they had come to some separate peace. 

\--

It would take them two days to drive to the Resettlement Administration camp in Shafter, California navigating with the old atlas they had used when they had first come to Dallam County. They would have to go hungry to save the money from the encyclopedias for gas. On Indian land outside Albuquerque they pulled over to the side of the highway to sleep and Remus woke in the night when a dust storm passed through the mountains and over the car. In the morning there was dust, fine and soft as salt or talcum powder, stuck in their fingerprints on the doors and windows. At noon they stopped for gas near Holbrook, Arizona and Lily went into the convenience store and bought a can of beans for twelve cents. She came out on the verge of tears with guilt because it seemed expensive and because they had so little money but they had not eaten at that point in two days or so. They filled their canteens in the restroom and put air in the tires and moved on again. 

Since they had been friends for so long and they had been the only people they saw for three years or so sometimes they did not even need to talk anymore. There was nothing on the radio, and the landscape was alien — white-red with dust and sunbleached foliage, and in the distance the mirage misshaped the bluffs and plateaus into strange stretching forms. Remus and Lily got out of the car and walked together on the great vast flat counting the boxcars on the trains moving Westward toward the setting sun. There was vivid red sand stuck in the folds of Remus’s jeans where he’d cuffed them up in the spring warmth. They waved to some hobos in one of the empty cars who waved to them back and called out something they didn’t hear. Then they walked back to the car again. 

\--

“We’re just South of the Grand Canyon now,” said Lily as she drove through Flagstaff. It had gone full dark and Remus was half asleep with his head against the window exhausted with sun and hunger. “Can you believe it.” 

Sometimes she did this, she just talked. And she did not expect him to answer. And she knew he was listening. 

“So close to us, now. The biggest and deepest — the realest wound.” 

The wound. He was thinking about water. How deep water cut. And how sweet. But now there was no water. 

“We had pictures of it from the National Geographic. Petunia and I — on the walls of our bedroom.” 

She was crying a little, he could hear it in her voice. He reached across the stick shift and grasped her knee and could feel just a little spark of the warmth of her skin through the torn denim. 

\--

When they reached Shafter they had four dollars and nineteen cents left between them, and they were told at the office by the harried superintendent that the camp was full. “With all due respect it seems like every Texie’s last straw was Black Sunday,” he said. They were standing in the shade of a hastily erected tent and they had been brought tin mugs of burnt coffee uncomfortably hot in the warm day. Children with dirty faces were running and playing laughing in the street and Lily watched them, lips pursed, arms folded tightly across her chest. They were both squinting in the sun reflecting brightly off the bleached sandy soil, sunburnt and wild-eyed from driving, clothes heavy with dust. And their car with the Texas plates had joined dozens of its like out front under the heavy blue sky. 

“We’ve got nowhere else to go,” Remus said. Then, remembering, “Sir.” 

“How old are you? And where you from?” 

“Twenty-one both of us. From Dallam County Texas.” 

“Sharecroppers?” 

“Tenant farming sir. We picked peas, beans — we had goats and chickens. We’ve done it all.” 

“We don’t have no money for gas to go nowhere else,” Lily said. “Otherwise we would. Sir.” 

The superintendent studied them both for a minute as though to gauge their sincerity and their physical or mental faculties. Finally he stepped aside and let them in the tent. There were pages upon pages of dossiers of notes stacked up on the makeshift folding tables and chairs and scattered stained mugs of coffee, and it smelled of food and cigarettes. 

“What’s your names?” said the superintendent. 

“Remus and Lily Lupin.” 

“I can get you a hot meal and some money for gas. You got an atlas in your car?” 

Lily went to fetch it and the superintendent sent someone to the mess hall after two bowls of beef stew and more coffee. “It’s more stew than beef I’ve got to tell you,” said the superintendent. He was bustling about clearing some of the folding chairs for Remus and Lily to sit on. “How long you been married?” 

“Four years.” 

“And you ain’t got kids?” 

There was a practiced deflection for this. Remus looked the superintendent in the eye. “We lost one,” he said. After all it was true. Lily wrote to Petunia once a month or so and heard nothing back. “A blessing in disguise I think sometimes,” he went on. He tried to make his voice sound falling apart. Sometimes he laid awake and thought about raising James’s son. Just for now, just for now, like Lily always said. Her sort of heartbeat lullaby to herself. Just until, just until. “We couldn’t raise — ”

She came back in the tent flap with the atlas, and he stopped. 

\--

They ate so ravenously Remus thought he might throw up, and the superintendent showed them on the atlas the route North on California 43 to 46 to 99 to a town called Pixley. 

“It isn’t an RA camp but it might be sometime soon. A lot of migrants like yourselves from Oklahoma and Texas have set up camp there and there’s good farm work.” 

They put gas in the car at the pumps in Shafter where they were side-eyed and whispered and hissed at by the natives (Lily in worn work pants, both of them stick-thin, junk tied up on the roof of the car rattling, everything dust), and they put air in the tires, and they drove up North into the waning of the day, silent and awestruck past the vivid greenness stretching on both sides unto the horizon, polished like a jewel the brightest most shining emerald greenness, like such greenness they had not seen in years, like such greenness they had almost forgotten existed. Set into the lapis box of the sky like a painter’s palette of oily colors. 

\--

It was a sprawling impossibility squared away amidst haggard low-hanging cottonwoods in a dismal stinking runoff ditch and in the goldenhour light in which they first saw it it looked like some waystation for refugees at the end of the world. Which of course perhaps it was. The children stopped in the makeshift street and watched with hollow eyes and mouths until their parents or their older siblings came to usher them away. They had camped in tents erected in jagged rows like gaping mountains snowcapped where the sun had bleached the thick canvas fabric and stained about the base with mud. Mothers in the shadows nursing. Cookfires crackled, children screamed. From somewhere a faulty pitch of drunken laughter. The thin brownish stream in the sandy depth of the wash smelled like piss or worse and very few residents buried their shit with reliability. Their jalopies bore plates from across the plains and signs in the windows, inscribed in the dust with a clean finger: _California or bust_. 

“Well,” Lily said, getting out of the car, stretching, kicking a scrap of metal at her feet, “we’re all here and it’s still bust.” 

They made a fire with found kindling and paper and ate a can of beans. Their neighbors were another young couple who watched them and at last waved and then gathered their children in the street and retired to their tent unspeaking. Remus and Lily slept in the car. In the morning they woke at dawn, dry-mouthed, aching, a little bewildered, and walked out with the rest of the able-bodied men and single women to the road. Like newborn animals wobbly about the knees into the uncertain dawn. 

\--

What had happened in Tulsa around the time that Lily got pregnant was that Remus had been seduced (he later with much humiliated reflection recognized himself utterly as the passive party in the complete scenario) by his father’s business partner. He was an immensely successful man having bought up most of the land surrounding the Texas oil boomtown of Crane on a whim about a decade previous, and he wore fine clothing and a multiplicity of rings and he was well-read and well travelled. His father was grooming Remus around that time to take control of at least some aspects of the business when he came of age and so he brought Remus with him to several meetings in Tulsa’s most reputable establishments where they smoked cigars and drank whiskey and laughed. 

Remus had recognized by this point several truths about himself the secretest of which he had only told James. Who had said, as he said about almost everything, listen, if we were in New York, it would be fine. As though the circumference of bigotry circumscribed Tulsa, Oklahoma and no further. He understood if he did not address it in any way and if he did not by any means take any action to catalyze what felt to him like a ceaseless and devouring hunger (at least until years later when he knew the actual feeling of the referent) perhaps it would go away. But he told James this and James made a sympathetic but uncertain face; anyway after that they never talked about it again. 

It felt to him like a rotten piece like he had a bad appendix or something and it was leaking through his whole body. And then the business partner. He had these big hands sliding out the buttons of Remus’s starched white shirt. Three times Remus’s age at least. And he smelled like expensive aftershave. And he had decided what he wanted and what he liked and was confident in his entitlement. Cheap land. Wool tweed suits. Jazz speakeasies where they had the good hallucinatory absinthe shipped from France and Belgium — where the girls still dressed like they had in the twenties and shifty shadowy men sold opium and cocaine, the glitzy gilded allure of New York, the fantasy of it, as it had been then, the captured memory, like a living photograph. And virgins. 

When the business partner had left Remus had written a kind of woozy and poetic sex-struck letter he would remember for years with shattering embarrassment. He had thought he was in love or something and he was terrified. It had been discovered by his father, who already was suspicious or so he reported later, in the stack of outgoing mail he usually took by the post office on his way to work. The rest was history. 

\--

In four weeks’ time Lily had found reliable work in Tipton, waiting tables six hours and tending bar for four more, and Remus was picking asparagus and peas and sometimes strawberries in the fields around the encampment, back aching, fingers chapped red-raw, sometimes for thirteen hour days in the beating livid sun. But it paid, and the soil was rich and smelled good, and sometimes it rained, soft warm rain they would work through laughing together until they could see and smell lightning coming closer far away across the long flat. Some days it was rather almost like he had imagined this being when he was young and he dreamt aimlessly of going West and homesteading in some dark woods, some anonymous plain — quiet and almost sacred and his heart was beating in his ears and down the line amidst the bright fragrant plants he could hear laughter… Yet most days he woke up aching at dawn in the backseat of the car, raw with hunger, bones scraping against each other in unholy protest, fought himself to his feet, head spinning with exhaustion. His run-ragged body spoke to him when he moved begging and pleading but he couldn’t acknowledge it. Lily’s hands were scoured crimson from washing dishes. Her lips had gone tight and when she met Remus’s eyes it was with an untranslatable conviction. 

In Tipton on a Sunday waiting for Lily while she worked Remus bought a length of canvas; they went back to their campsite and fashioned it into a tent. After that for two weeks they had to kill birds to eat and beg scraps from Lily’s restaurant and bruised produce from the fields. But it was better than sleeping in the car. 

\--

It was on another Sunday that the photographer came. Those days Remus only worked eight hours or so, but Lily worked late. It was full summer and unreal hot, and the ditch stank, but Remus couldn’t afford the gas to go to Tipton and sit in Lily’s restaurant drinking cheap burnt coffee until she got off of work, and anyway last time he had tried it he had been forced out by the manager, so he stayed at the camp in the shade and tried to read a novel he’d been lent by a migrant woman from Kansas, whose mother had been a librarian, who had forced them to leave with a milk crate of books — _Manhattan Transfer_ by John Dos Passos. 

In the sun-baked stillness a car rumbled past on the road dislodging gravel and he didn’t look up, because he was reading. Later he reasoned he didn’t even hear the footsteps on the road because those, like the sounds of children shouting and the stench and the wind, had become part of the ambient texture of that place, like the greenery around or the feeling of the sun or the sound of Lily’s snores. Then someone said, “Can I take your picture?” 

It was a man with a wild sort of face, handsome, not particularly tall, in fine if rumpled clothes. He had longer hair than any man Remus had ever seen, and it was black and sleek as oil. In both hands he was holding a big black leather Graflex camera and the lens on it was like a distorted mirror refracting a bent bubble of sky. 

“What?” Remus said. He did not think he had heard correctly. 

“I said can I take your picture.” The man took a step closer. There was a little sweat standing out on his forehead in the heat, and a rash of sun freckles high across his cheeks and the bridge of his nose, and his eyes which moved quickly and questioningly so bright grey as to seem silver. And he was very young. “I’m Sirius Black. I’m a photographer for the Resettlement Administration.” He balanced the body of the camera against his forearm and put his free hand out and Remus shook it. “What’s your name?” 

“Remus Lupin. Sure I guess you can take my picture.” 

The camera had these silver handles flanking the lens box that Sirius Black held. He pressed his face to the velvet-limned opening into the mirror darkness and Remus watched the low breeze, dry and hot, like breath, lift his long hair where it had stuck with sweat to the back of his neck. 

“Don’t look at the lens,” said Sirius Black. 

It made him feel like he was about to be pickpocketed or something but he looked to the South across the camp, toward the ridge of the ditch and beyond it the spreading emerald fields. The light dying over them long and lovely. “Okay.” 

_Click._

“Where are you from?” 

“Dallam County Texas.” 

_Click._

“When did you leave?” 

“Two months ago — almost exactly. Just after Black Sunday.” 

“Are you here alone?” 

“No. With my wife.”

_Click._

“Where’s she?” 

“She works in Tipton at Norma’s Diner.” 

Black put the camera down. There was a little red print around his eyes like a Victorian mask from pressing his face to the viewfinder. “I was just there. Which one is she?” 

“Lily. Redhead with green eyes.” 

He smiled with a spread of perfect sun-catching teeth. “I met her. I have her picture too. She sassed the hell out of me.” 

“Yes, that’s — that’s what she does.” 

Black lifted the camera again. “Did you all meet in Dallam County?” 

“No, we’re from Tulsa, Oklahoma, known each other since we were kids.” 

_Click._

“What’re you reading?” 

“What?” 

“I said what are you reading.” 

Remus lifted _Manhattan Transfer_ to show him. _Click_. 

“What do you think?” 

“I’ve just started reading it. But I do like it so far.” 

_Click._

“I’m from Manhattan,” Black said. “That novel’s not far from the reality as I’ve experienced it.” 

“What are you doing all the way out here from New York?” 

“I told you. Working for the Resettlement Administration.” _Click._ “My dad’s in real estate so we didn’t get hit so hard by the Depression when I was growing up. But in my family’s perspective I reneged my claim upon my inheritance when I went to art school. So I got work from Roosevelt and the alphabet agencies like the rest of you all. Look at me for just a second.” 

Remus did. _Click_. 

“This isn’t a Resettlement Administration camp,” Remus told him. “In Shafter they said not yet. But it might be someday.” 

“That’s what they told me too,” Black said, putting the camera down. “Drive around the Valley and see. They’ll send aid into migrant camps if it’s bad enough.” 

“Will they really.” 

“Yes.” 

“Well fresh water would be nice.” 

“Have you not got — ”

“We boil it from the stream.” 

Remus folded his page over in the book and they walked down to the wash together. “Dear sweet Jesus,” Black said. He pulled up the collar of his shirt over his nose and mouth. 

“Lily used to bring water back in canteens from the kitchen at her work. But then her boss found out.” 

Black took a couple pictures. He crouched in the dust, wrinkling his nose; the back of his neck was sunburnt, and the collar limp; his spine pressed up tectonically against the pale and thin fabric of his shirt. This close it was apparent his clothes had been fine one day but were no longer. To turn one’s back on a real estate trust fund in order to study photography at college seemed to Remus almost incalculably stupid. But then he himself in turn had done something incalculably stupid which had cost him his own oil money trust fund.

They walked together back up toward Black’s car. “Are you hungry,” Black asked Remus finally, not really looking at him. 

“Yes. Almost always.” 

“I meant — I can drive you up to Tipton and we can go to the grocery. Then I can bring you and Lily back here. She said she gets off work at ten.” 

“I don’t — you need money for gas, and for film I guess.” 

“I have a stipend from the RA,” Black said; “Government money. I can buy you groceries.” 

\--

They walked together through the silent fluorescent aisles watched by the clerks who turned from their shelving to observe. As Black had left the camera in the car he looked rather like a migrant himself — sweaty, a little stubble, dusty boots. Remus they recognized from his scant voyages to the grocery on payday to buy a five cent candy bar to split with Lily, or a bit of lye soap, or, once, guiltily, a can of tomatoes. 

“You know it snowed red last winter,” Black said. “The dust came all the way to New York and it snowed red.” 

“I’ve never seen it snow.” 

“Not ever?” 

“Never.” 

“It’s lovely,” Black said, “it makes everything quiet. You could walk in the city and feel like the last man on earth.” 

Remus picked out canned goods, margarine, sugar, flour, an onion, two candy bars. It rang up to three dollars and sixty-seven cents and Black paid for it, then he bought a pack of cigarettes and the Bakersfield newspaper. They went outside and sat on the warm hood of Black’s dusty car watching the dusk descend purple-grey. Perhaps in the night it would rain. The sky was heavy and dark and fragrant and the dregs of the sun seemed to drip out of it like honey through the net of the distant hills. 

“Why did you and Lily leave Tulsa,” Black asked.

“I don’t — are you going to tell the RA and everything all about us?” 

“I’m just curious.” 

“How about I’ll tell you if you tell me why you’re working this job.” 

Black unwrapped the pack of cigarettes and offered Remus one. It had been so long since he'd smoked. The box of matches Black offered him was nearly empty and the cover was printed with a gilded outline of the Plaza Hotel, New York. Something like a snake moved in Remus’s stomach. 

“I told my father I was going to school for business but instead I studied the arts and the classics and all that, then I met Alfred Stieglitz, he did a lecture at my school, and I decided I was going to be a photographer.” 

“How did you learn?” 

“I joined the Camera Club of New York. And I practiced. There were classes at my college. I bought my camera and a bunch of film all in one go with my last draw from my trust fund. I think my father thought I was paying for hookers or something. So then I told him I didn’t want to take over the business and, you know, the shit hit the fan, et cetera. I was staying with some people for a while on Long Island in this Gatsby-esque stagnation. And then three months ago I had had it and I tried to go get work with the WPA. And I told them I was a photographer and they told me the Resettlement Administration had need of photographers. So here I am.” 

“And you wanted — you decided all this just from — ” 

“When Stieglitz came and spoke he had these slides, slides of his work. They were so, they were like paintings. But they were like, like a sort of filament or a fracture of something real. Like a piece of the moment broken off and immortalized — like, presence, in it, with it, with history. Which at this moment, you know, at the crux of the death knell of industrial capitalism — ” 

He stopped short. Somewhere a car backfired. In the silence the wind passed cool and wet downvalley smelling like woodsmoke and rain. In the stillness the sound of cigarette paper atomizing seemed very loud. And the sound of Sirius Black’s breath. 

“I don’t care if you’re a socialist,” Remus said. 

“I’m a communist,” said Sirius Black, “actually; I bought your groceries because in a communist society production is distributed according to people’s needs. But that isn’t the point. What do you know about — ” 

“You think I — ” He had to stop and take a breath. “I do know _something_ despite I didn’t go to college. My dad’s an oil baron of sorts.” 

“You have oil barons in — ”

“Yes we have oil barons in Tulsa. The whole middle of this country isn’t a cesspool of dust.” 

“Then why’d you leave?” 

“Because of the fucking — ”

“Besides the dust. Before the dust, I mean, why did you leave Tulsa? Like I asked.” 

As ever he wondered how much of the truth to tell. In Dallam County most of their neighbors left well enough alone. Sometimes people asked, and they answered obliquely: we got married in a rush, they sometimes said. We lost the child. Her mother didn’t approve. His father didn’t approve. She loves cowboy stories. He always wanted to be a goddamn gentleman farmer. He chose the old standby though it always tasted like acid in his mouth: “We got married fast. The approval wasn’t, um, unanimous. It was a torture to walk around for months I can tell you. My father was planning to sell this land in Texas when the tenants left it. But I begged him for it practically on my hands and knees.” 

In the momentary silence Sirius dropped his cigarette and Remus watched the ember burn out against the gravel. “That isn’t the whole truth, is it,” Sirius said. 

“No, it’s not.” 

Someone drove past and yelled out the window of the car something about Okies. Nevermind Sirius’s car had New York plates. “That’s alright,” Sirius said. “Do they do that to you all the time?” 

“Yes. Every day. They say worse things to Lily at the diner.” 

“Why do you think?” 

“I don’t know. We’re poor and starving and look dirty.” 

“You looked — I thought the both of you looked… I don’t know how to say it. You had so much purpose and conviction. That’s why I took your pictures.” 

“I was just — I was reading a book.” 

“And she was just busing tables. I don’t know, it was in your look. A sort of resilience or defiance to circumstance. I don’t want to be one of those National Geographic photographers who takes pictures of suffering people suffering. You just had humanity, I don’t know. Or hopefulness.” 

“I don’t know about hopefulness.” 

“It’s okay to be hopeful in the face of all this,” said Sirius. He turned to Remus and his silver eyes moved quickly. Quick as rain. The sunburnt wedge of his neck in his collar. There was something about his wrists, his hands, clever and quick with intention, steady when he’d held the camera. Something felt burning, slowly burning, succumbing, like dominoes collapsing. Like the slow creeping heat of a forest fire. “How else could we live?” 

\--

At nine-thirty they went to get Lily and then Sirius drove them back to the camp. Remus was careful to sit with her in the backseat and hold her hand. The band of her ring was a cold comfort against his skin. “Do you think I could come to the fields with you to take pictures tomorrow,” Sirius said. He was glancing at Remus and Lily occasionally in the rearview mirror with an interrogative interest. 

Remus wasn’t sure it would fly but he gave Sirius directions anyway. “We’re picking peas now. I don’t know if it’s visually compelling.” 

“I want to make a picture like Millet’s _Gleaners_ ,” said Sirius, which meant positively nothing to either Remus or Lily. “I don’t mind visually uncompelling. Probably it’ll be interesting to folks in the East who have no conception of the Western scale — but don’t let me keep you from your, you know, from your beauty sleep…” 

He dropped them off at the side of Route 99 and they walked together through the camp back to their tent carrying the groceries, trading off the heaviest bag. Most of the tents were dark and the embers in the firepits gone cold, and the children were silent, and occasionally lightning flashed skim-milk blue across their path illuminating the gravel and the trees in shocking shadow. “What an odd man,” said Lily. 

“He said you sassed him.” 

“I sass every man who tells me I look pretty. Even you.” 

Something flashed and twisted. More like thunder than lightning in Remus’s gut. “He told you you looked pretty?” 

“Yes. He didn’t tell you the same?” 

“I guess he did in not so many words.” 

“You like him,” said Lily in a sing-songy whisper. “I can tell. He likes you too.” 

Remus scoffed. “He doesn’t.” 

“He does.”

“Even if he does he thinks we’re married.” 

“We _are_ married.” 

“You know what I mean.” 

“Just tell him you and I have an arrangement. What could go wrong? He won’t be here for very long.” 

That’s what could go wrong, he didn’t tell her. 

“Don’t you miss it,” Lily went on. “Having someone just to hold you. I miss it.” 

“I’d hold you if you asked,” Remus told her, hurt. 

“And I you. But it’s not the same. And you know that.” 

\--

Remus and a few of the other men in the camp had made it down three rows of peas by their lunch break (rather erroneously named, as few of them could afford three meals a day, and those that could left the midday one back at camp for their wives and children) when Sirius Black showed up, rattling dust on the gravel farm road, and parked his fancy car with the New York plates surreptitiously behind the barn. 

“What the hell,” said one of the guys. 

“He takes pictures for the RA,” said another. “He was wandering around yesterday.” 

“He told me we could get federal aid in our camp if his pictures showed that things are hard,” Remus said. “He took a bunch of pictures in the wash. Maybe we could get fresh water if you all keep your mouths shut and don’t sass him for being a Yankee.” 

“Don’t know if I can hold off, Lupin,” said the first guy. Sirius had climbed out of the car and was assembling his camera; against the heat he’d tied his hair up on top of his head the way Lily did sometimes. 

Remus hadn’t slept well and had decided he had to pay Sirius back for the groceries and the bummed cigarettes. He felt almost nauseous with the heat and hunger and unsleptness and he had relatively little patience for it as Sirius introduced himself to the rest of the guys and shook their hands and it humiliated him deeply when Sirius offered the rest of them cigarettes and they declined. 

How does anyone keep their pride like this in hell, he wondered. His hands felt like clubs, tingling with blood in the heat, huge and insensate on the small soft peas. Absently he worried he might end up like their old campmate who had fainted in the fields one day with hunger and heat and had left after that and never been seen again. It seemed another example of the same. After all he’d never been all that good at being a man, as his father had seen fit to repeatedly remind him. 

He listened to the click and flash of Sirius’s camera and the shuffle of his own feet in the thick soil. And his own breathing, and the smell of the plants. Sometimes he found himself counting over and over again to one-hundred all day long just to keep his mind from straying somewhere dark. He thought of Lily and sometimes James and sometimes of their son who he had held all of once and sometimes, in an evil way, he thought about his father’s business partner, who of course would probably laugh if he saw Remus now. Who of course had probably only ever been laughing. 

\--

At the end of the day the rest of the men left to walk back to camp and Remus went to ask the farmer about more work. As was customary his face was laughed in, so he went back out to the gravel road. Sirius was there waiting in his fancy car fingerprinted with dust, smoking a cigarette. 

“Let’s go to the diner,” he said. 

“Why.” 

“No reason.” 

Remus started walking and Sirius put the car in gear and slowly crept after him.

“Get in the car.” 

“No.” 

“Why not?” 

Remus turned to him. “I’m going to pay you back for the groceries.” 

“No you’re not. I told you. It’s against my beliefs. In fact, even in a capitalist society, or at least in a capitalist society on paper — ” 

He started walking. Sirius kept following. The car rumbled and rattled and kicked dust up and Remus coughed. Finally he said, “It isn’t — I’m not thinking whatsoever about abstract socioeconomic systems. I’m thinking on a real-life level that I don’t want to be in debt. To you or anybody. Which is fucking hard because I also want to be able to eat and I want Lily to be able to eat and I want to live in a house with walls.” 

“The first thing you need to do is abolish the concept of debt from — ” 

“Don’t — you need to stop. I could fucking read the _Communist Manifesto_ if I wanted to.” 

“Okay,” Sirius said, “well I have a copy with me in the car. You should get in the car. You haven’t eaten all day.” 

Remus turned to him again. He was holding out the window balancing carefully in his long-fingered pale hand a pockmarked and yellowish orange. 

\--

They went to the diner. Lily, hair frizzing out of her bun around her head in a kind of effervescent heat halo, brought them coffees and perked a surreptitious eyebrow at Remus. They lifted the mugs so she could talk to them for a while under the guise of wiping the table with a ragged cloth. “Were you at McConnell’s today?” she asked Remus. 

“No, Reitman’s.” 

“Alright?” 

“Yeah I guess alright. How’s your day?” 

“Fine. It’s damn hot and it’s made the locals even nastier than they usually are if you can believe it.” She tucked the cloth back in her apron. “You gentlemen want what, blue plate specials? It’s corned beef hash and eggs today for fifty cents.” 

Remus was about to backpedal but Sirius said, “Sounds good.” 

“Did you get your _Gleaners_ picture today,” Lily asked him. She had settled her fist on her hip the way she did when she was about to issue some grand challenge. 

“Oh, I think so. Very photogenic fields at Reitman’s.” 

Remus laughed. “Sure,” Lily said. 

“In all honestly it looks like backbreaking work and it’s hellish hot. I’ve been trying to think, how can I show in the pictures how hot it is? I think that’s what people will be surprised to know.” 

“People out East don’t know it’s hot in Southern California?” 

“I think they probably think they understand but they don’t really. Same is true of any number of things.” 

“Sure,” said Lily. Someone came in ringing the bells above the door, and she half turned. In the smeary light through the wide windows she looked the sculpted bust of some Gothic poetess confined to an asylum as a teenager. “I’ll put your orders in,” she said, resting her hand just for a moment on Remus’s shoulder. Sirius studied the gesture the way Remus supposed an artist would but to him the weight of her hand, like a falcon or something perched there, represented a communication of strength. This was the only way, Remus sometimes realized, they ever really touched one another — to share something unsaid. Then she slipped away. 

Sirius was watching Lily with that same look, like an artist’s, studying motion, as she showed the new customers to a table.“You two don’t act so much like husband and wife,” he said.

Something like a thrill of panic froze in Remus’s gut. “How’s that?” 

“You don’t hardly bicker or argue or any of it.” 

“You’ve known us for two goddamn days. Of course we bicker and argue just not in front of people.” 

“Most of the married couples I know don’t care whether they bicker in front of people or not.” 

“She’s my friend,” Remus tried to explain. Thinking, in the back of his mind, about what Lily had said the night previous. “We started as friends. So that’s what makes it easy. And we’ve been through a lot together lately so, most of what we ever fought about seems real trivial now.” 

“I was thinking about that too. Most of the things that terrified me in school seem trivial now. What with this.” He gestured widely in attempt to encompass, Remus understood, the dust, the depression, the horror, his disowning, the heat, the pain of the work, and the catcalls, and the locals’ disdain… As though it all could be encompassed by a gesture or by anything. As though its antecedents were not obvious and so too were its ends. A chill passed, impossibly in the heat, up Remus’s spine. “And with — do you ever read the paper, you know, do you read about Europe?” 

“What, about Hitler?” 

“Yes about Hitler. Nazi Germany is re-arming and conscripting again. Just the other day Britain agreed they could build back their navy at least in part.” 

“Why would they do that?” 

“Baldwin and Chamberlain and their ilk in the British Parliament are frightened to go back to war. As anybody would be after the last one. But the central hallmark of a fascist government is preparation for war and that’s exactly what Nazi Germany is and exactly what they’re doing.” 

“I’ve been wondering — what will be the tipping point. What will start it.” 

Sirius scoffed. “I don’t think you’ll learn anything about that from the Bakersfield paper.” 

“Well I can’t exactly get the New York _Times_ delivered to my fucking house.” 

“I’m just — it’s a general problem,” Sirius said, looking away, “it’s not just you.” 

“I don’t think you’ve processed that your communist revolution depends on actual people with lives and problems. Not just a faceless bloc of oppressed workers unilaterally seeking vengeance or whatnot.” 

“That’s a very American mindset.” 

“Well that’s where we are, aren’t we? It doesn’t matter if you don’t like it or it doesn’t fit for you. It’s the truth.” He took a breath, like to steady himself. Sirius had fixed him across the table with the pale grey eyes. “The one special thing about who we are is that we all grew up thinking this land would provide for us no matter what. Rain follows the fucking plow and all of it. And we _all_ have that — that was our universal entitlement. And now that this, the dust, and the depression, we have to reconsider everything we ever felt was guaranteed. And I can promise you not everybody is going to come out of all that reconsidering feeling like the answer is overthrowing it all and trying something fucking new. Most people aren’t even going to reconsider at all and instead they’re just going to feel comfortable in their fear. And who knows where that’ll go what with everything there is to fear right now? I don't want to know. So I just work every day so that I can get paid and me and Lily can eat. And I try to have no debts because my big fear that I can’t reconsider is that everything given to me is going to get demanded back from me one day when I least expect it.” 

Sirius was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “You’re paying me back with intellectual labor. By talking with me.” 

“Cut the fucking bullshit,” Remus said, but he laughed. 

“Do you think about this kind of stuff all the time?” 

“When I’m working. I have to think about something otherwise it feels like time isn’t moving.” 

Sirius leant forward across the table like to tell Remus a secret. His lips were sunburnt and peeling, and behind them his teeth seemed very white, and his tongue very red. His hair was ink-dark coming down from where he’d tied it up like thick strips of ink against his neck and jaw and forehead. So much as looking at him was like some satin ribbon tying up each of Remus’s organs one by one, a kind of archaic erotic torture, wrapping and pulling tight, almost suffocatingly sweet. 

“I know it wouldn’t work here,” Sirius said, almost a whisper. He wouldn’t quite meet Remus’s eye; he was looking just beneath. “Logically I know that. It would take a cataclysm for it to work here.” 

“You mean communism?” 

“Any of it. We literally reinvented our own founding mythology to center capitalistic individualism.” 

“I’ve never thought about it that way.” 

Sirius leant still closer. “Inasmuch as I’m here because this job was my only option short of rumrunning or enlisting I’m also here because what was done to you and your wife was monstrous and — ”

“What was _done_ — ”

“Yes. What was done. You were sold a bill of goods under the same manifest destiny bullshit. Westward fucking ho. Or at least that’s what I think happened, because you won’t tell me why you left Tulsa.” 

Remus didn’t say anything. His heart was in his throat and wouldn’t settle. Sirius pinched the bridge of his nose between two fingers and Remus noticed for the first time that he had bitten his bruised nails halfway down the ragged bloody beds of them. 

“If it were up to the capitalist process you would never get aid to your camp and you would never get better work,” Sirius said. He looked up at Remus, propping up his temple against his fist. “Probably you would die here of heat exhaustion before age thirty, or you would die fighting the Nazis, whichever comes first, I don’t know. And yet everything the government is trying to do to help you is being waylaid at every turn by cowards who fear socialism. So I am here because maybe, just maybe, if they can understand and visualize you’re a good man working hard under circumstances beyond your control they will allow the federal government to help you. Which will create conditions for — maybe something else. Not socialism. But something where — we’re supposed to care about each other. You know?” 

Of course it boiled down to something so simple for someone who had probably never really been loved. 

“Empathy can’t — ” Remus tried. Then he stopped. “They can’t just pass a law — ” 

“I don’t understand, is what I’m trying to say. Why it seems like they can’t grasp it whatsoever.” 

“I just told you,” Remus said, almost gentling. “Because they’re afraid.” 

With percussive timeliness Lily came bursting forth from the kitchen and dropped each chipped blue plate of eggs and hash from a shocking, unwise, and certainly pointed height onto the table. 

\--

They ate, and talked for a while longer about other than politics, and they traded off sections of that morning’s Bakersfield paper, which Sirius had bought at the grocery earlier in the day. Then at quarter to eight as they were watching the gold sunset light sink into the darkness spreading from the East Lily came over wiping her hands on her apron with her face a picture of soft apology. 

“I’ve got to stay late,” she said. “They just told me in the kitchen.” 

She gathered up their coffee mugs, and Remus looked around the diner. He and Sirius and Lily were alone but for two ragged-looking drifters at the bar with cigarettes, hats covering their faces, unspeaking as they nursed cold coffee; they were lingering as long as they could before the manager kicked them out into the night. 

“Would you be so kind Mr. Black as to give my husband a ride back to camp? I’ll get one later with one of the girls…” 

She turned to Remus and her eyes were sparking. A purposeful conviction. She clasped his shoulder again. 

“Of course,” Sirius said. He was watching them across the table, at the pale flat inside of Lily’s arm marked with a few red-vivid fading burn scars from the kitchen, and at Remus’s sharp sunburnt collar inside his shirt, and somehow through the thick stillness as though thought itself could transmute through it Remus could feel that he wanted to take a photograph. He was framing it carefully with his quickly-moving eyes, and then he said, “I’d be honored to.” 

\--

Sirius paid the check with change and then they went out to the car. In the pale streetlight he dug out two cigarettes from the pack in his shirt pocket, and he lit both with the last match from the Plaza Hotel matchbook. Then they got in the car and drove South toward the camp. 

“I have to leave,” Sirius said, loudly over the wind and the road rumbling through the open windows. “Tomorrow. I’m supposed to go shoot in Merced.” 

He had propped up his forehead in his hand again, elbow against the car door, and his cigarette was ashing onto the once-fine grey pants. He looked very tired, which was to say were it not for his New York license plates and his long hair he could have passed for a Texie or an Okie himself. And perhaps, Remus realized, he was, of a sort; he too had fled nothing for just a little more nothing… 

“Where’s Merced?” Remus asked him. 

“Four or five hours or so driving North of here on Route 99.” 

“And then where?” 

“I don’t know. I think in Merced I can develop the photographs. And I can stop on the way — there’s an RA office in Visalia. Have you and Lily been there?” 

“They told us that camp was full too, when we first came out.” 

“Yes, it is. I think they all are.” 

“There’ll only be more and more like ours if that’s true.” 

They both were speaking around something. Not far from the camp Sirius pulled over to the side of the road to photograph the final dregs of sunset caught like embers in the far Western hills. “Have you ever seen the Pacific Ocean,” Remus asked him. He was sitting in the car still with the door open twisting out his cigarette butt under the toe of his boot watching Sirius hold the camera almost like a child. 

“No. Have you?” 

“No.” 

“It’s just beyond the mountains,” Remus said, for no reason at all. 

The sun was melting in it when he closed his eyes. He had thought of the dust as its own sort of sea in the end of it; it howled and roared, and one could drown in it, it was so thin it almost felt like water, as though some basic alchemy or transubstantiation had occurred when every living inch had evaporated from that corner of the earth. Except it was sharp. It stretched forever across the world and in its formidability was a presence and a lifeness that terrified him and that watched, he was certain, him and Lily while they slept, and which knew everything, every inch of everything — but perhaps the land had always been like that, even while it had been biding its time, and they had not noticed. 

Out of absolutely nowhere, like out of his gut, or his heart, like blood or bile, Remus said, “Lily and me have a sort of — an arrangement.” 

Sirius turned. The dusk had caught behind him like a rime of gold and he looked not so much surprised. “What sort of arrangement.” 

“Both of us, um, we were obliged to repair our family’s reputations quickly. Because we had rather dragged them through the mud or so they perceived. She was pregnant with my best friend James’s kid. He and Lily are, they’re in love, you know, they’re soulmates. The problem is he’s black.” 

Sirius’s brow furrowed and he looked away. Kicked a stone that skittered under the car. “That isn’t — it’s not a problem in New York.” 

“Yes, that’s what they say. And that’s what they were trying then and what they still write about doing someday. But it isn’t, you know it takes money, it takes a lot of money, and I don’t know what sort of work there is in New York. And anyway Lily’s sister has their son and never — we don’t know how he is. He’d be four now. I don't think they intend for Lily to ever have him back. It eats her up though, I think. We don’t really talk about it.” 

“And what did — what did you do,” Sirius said. He was looking intently down the long road to the South as though written on it were some lengthy and encoded secret. “To degrade your family name or whatnot.” 

“I — could I have another cigarette?” 

Sirius put the camera in the backseat and from his pocket he took the pack of cigarettes. But then he said, “I haven’t got any more matches.” 

“It’s alright. Thank you anyway.” 

“I’m sorry.” 

“It’s — why are you sorry?” 

Without answering Sirius looked away again down the road to the South and carefully and almost self-protectively he folded his arms over his chest. 

“I slept with my father’s business partner is what I’m trying to tell you.” 

Sirius said something like, oh, without sound. 

“I was basically a child I realize now. I guess that was what he wanted. It felt like being moved around by puppet strings. But also it was what I wanted and I wanted it so badly. I don’t know why I’m telling you this.” 

“It’s — I don’t mind.” 

“Are they fine with that in New York too.” 

“Not with that — you were — anyway with none of it yet.” 

“You have to kill it, I think, if you want to live. But it won’t die. I’ve fucking tried. My father tried.” 

“Did he — ”

“ — beat the living fuck out of me, yes.” 

“Mine was just, I used to think of it as a kind of verbal flagellation.” Sirius turned toward the fault and the mountains and the sea. “I’m leaving tomorrow,” he said again. 

“I know you are which is why I’m telling you.” 

“Well what do you want me to do about it?” 

“I don’t know,” Remus said, though he did. “Kiss me or something.” 

“Alright.” 

“Alright?” 

“Yes. Not here. And I want more matches, a-and a — ” 

He turned and ducked quickly almost like a dancer and his feet scuffed in the dust and his hand was on Remus’s face thumb up against his ear fingers around the back of his skull nervous and not ungentle in his hair and their lips touched like a striking snake or something before Remus could process most of what had happened. 

“ — and a chocolate bar,” Sirius said, very close. His eyes moved liquid-bright and huge in the semidarkness. He kissed Remus again, for longer this time, and he tasted like coffee and like salt, and his mouth was warm and golden, and Remus dared to reach and touch the soft worn fabric of his shirt, and then he pulled away again. 

“Matches,” he said. 

\--

They went to the grocery and Remus waited in the car wildly jostling his knee. Then they drove out on the farm roads toward Porterville into the inky darkness. When Sirius cut the headlights the moon cut a cottony wedge of light into the sky and the stars were so bright as to seem like the lights of a distant civilization across a vast expanse of water. They wandered off the road into a field left fallow, absently touching, sharing a cigarette and the chocolate bar, not talking much. Remus took his boots off after a little while; under his feet the earth felt soft and rich, wet and cool and sweet with life and dense as clay. He was trying to remember the last time he had walked anywhere barefoot. When they finished the cigarette they buried the butt of it like a seed. 

The moonlight was cotton-white and in it all color had a blue cast. Sirius kissed him again and they sat down in the soil and clutched at each other. He tasted like smoke and chocolate. The moisture in the ground seeped up through his clothing against Remus’s skin like a sort of lifeblood. 

He had forgotten the precise sensation of longing and he did not think he had ever felt it before without a twinge of fear. The prideful and heedless longing coursing like rainwater. His blood in his ears sounded like the dust storms used to sound outside the windows in the night in the house in Dallam County, whistling in the clapboard, radio static, when he and Lily lay eighteen inches between them on the itchy mattress mouths and eyes raw-dry and unsleeping in the eternity of wind. 

It had been so long since he had dared to let his body do anything but what it needed to do to eat and he had almost forgotten what it was like to give over. It did not feel so much like succumbing as it felt like some radical act of resistance. 

“What are you thinking about?” Sirius asked. 

“I don’t know. I forgot,” he tried, “what this was — ” 

Sirius had pressed a hand over Remus’s belly and he shifted it slowly twining his fingers through the crenellated shell of Remus’s ribs. His eyes were impossibly soft and almost reflective in the pale light. “Your heart’s beating really fast.” 

“Yes, fuck you, of course it is. It has been, like for hours.” 

Sirius grinned, accomplished. He pressed his nose to Remus’s jaw and then his mouth and teeth. 

“Do you ever feel like — ” Remus said. He wasn’t sure why he was talking. He could feel his voice echo inside himself and against Sirius. “I feel like there’s less of me now than there was before. Like this didn’t used to be hollow. None of it used to be hollow. I never noticed it before but it feels obvious, you know, with you looking at it.” 

“At what?” 

“I don’t know. At me.” 

He thought he understood finally what Sirius had said before: _something monstrous_ … He almost said it aloud. 

“I feel like I got eaten up,” he said instead. It felt tugged out of him, like by a string pulled up from his gut through his mouth, and he realized he was speaking not of any one thing but of the larger. The grand and incorrigible conductor, the influencer, the devourer. He could not say exactly what it was because his mind flinched away from it like a raw wound. “I feel like — eaten alive. Like it swallowed me — like locusts or something. Like it gnawed all the flesh off me.” 

“But you didn’t,” Sirius said. With incredible surprise Remus realized his eyes were wet and red in the corners. “You didn’t,” he said again. His hand wrapped the bone and grist case of Remus’s heart so tightly he could feel the scabby ragged fingernails. “You’re here with me. And I see you.” 

\--

He had forgotten about making love and the wholeness of it. And he was thinking their bodies were like some runic conversation against the night, or he was thinking nothing at all. Or they were nothing at all. Overhead the stars were moving in the firmament against the frame of the distant mountains. Most of the time they were breathing through each other like some cosmonautic apparatus. 

He felt Sirius’s ragged knuckles inside his thigh and something inside him fell from a height and shattered spreading some golden yearning that almost hurt. But then the hand passed up slowly toward his hip. “You can,” he said. His voice sounded thick in his ears. “Come on.” 

“I can what?” 

“I don’t know. Whatever you want.” 

“Well what do _you_ want?” 

“Jesus Christ, I think you know.” 

Sirius’s knuckles smoothed down again along the beating-bright vein toward the burning core of him. 

“You’re only the second,” Remus said, almost hysterically, “the second to have ever — ”

The pad of Sirius’s thumb pressed against-inside him and he jolted. “It doesn’t matter,” Sirius said; he kissed inside Remus’s knee, and his face was blank and almost shocked, mouth just open; he kissed against the heartbeat in the vein in Remus’s thigh, lower, coaxing him open, Remus realized, a dull and mystifying blow: unravelling him, like a spool of twine; “It doesn’t matter,” Sirius said again. 

Hardly more than his warm breath and the cool earth. The gestural unsilence of their skin and bones in the moon-ripe stillness. 

\--

Perhaps it was one or two in the morning when they walked back to Sirius’s car together, muddy, disheveled, shirts misbuttoned, carrying their shoes. Flushed and sweaty and shaken-out in the night heat. The moon above had shifted and turned like a key inside a lock. 

“Do you think you’ll go back to New York? When this is over?” 

It was a stupid question to ask somebody who had just been inside you. “When what’s over?” Sirius asked. 

“I don’t — I’m not sure. This, I guess, the depression, the dust, the — whatever happens in Europe.” 

“If we live long enough to see the end of it,” Sirius said. “I’ll end up back in New York one day. I think I could find work if these pictures come out good. And I feel like — I have to go back there because it made me how I am. For better or worse.” 

They drove out on the farm roads toward Route 99 and once they reached the highway turned Southerly toward the camp but just around the bend from it Sirius pulled over and cut the engine and the headlights and pulled Remus toward him by the back of the neck. 

“Are they going to think — ”

“Just that I was out drinking. It’s nothing.” 

“You’re covered in, in dirt, it’s all in your hair,” Sirius said, against Remus’s mouth, but he was smiling. His fingers rifled at the nape of Remus’s neck, behind his ear, at the wedge of his jaw. Their kiss lasted — he was not certain how long. A drowning and devouring kiss which wrapped self and history into its very being and drew them all together and erased. A kiss like a dream that stayed with you upon waking. He thought perhaps he looked up again seconds later yet by the stars he had memorized on every sleepless night he could tell it was nearly dawn. 

“Will you come to New York with Lily,” Sirius said, holding his face. Like a precious thing. “When she — with her man and her son, will you come?” 

I will — yes, I will yes. He waited on the side of the road and watched the red taillights of Sirius’s car fade into the North like beacons or like stars. 

\--

After work in the McConnells’ fields the next day Remus went to the diner and sat alone in the same front booth, and he studied his hands intently under the table, the soil beneath the nails and the dust imprinted in the creases, the skin almost grayish with the flaking clayey talc clenched in his fists the evening previous, until his wife came over from the kitchen. 

“Black came in this morning,” Lily said when he looked up, cocking an eyebrow, “he looked like a kid on Christmas.” 

“Well he goddamn better have.” 

From behind the counter she brought him a mug of coffee. Then she rested her hand on his shoulder again. 

“He said he was going up to Merced.” 

“Yes. By way of the RA office in Visalia.” 

“He left me fifty cents to buy you something to eat. You want a blue plate special?” 

“What is it?” 

“Something Mexican — Maria fixed it up. It’s rice and beans and stewed beef in tortillas with red sauce. It’s got a Spanish name but I don’t know it. It’s delicious.” 

“Sure, let’s have it.” 

In what was a shocking display of public affection from Lily she leant over and kissed his temple. In the pale evening light upon the Formica and the torn leather he felt worn soft, almost transparent… he closed his eyes and let Lily’s hand on his shoulder ground him. “I really love you,” she said. 

“I really love you too.” 

“I just want — you deserve to to have, to have happiness.” 

They looked at each other. She had wrapped her hands, nervously, tightly, in her apron. “I am happy,” he told her. 

“Are you really.” 

“Yes. Thank you — thank you. I am happy.” 

She went to the kitchen to fetch his dinner. He watched out the window the pale dusk light in the distant hills. 

\--

Months later it was coming on fall and Remus was in the checkout line at the grocery, chewing his nails, fifty cents held tightly in hand and a few cans of beans clutched against his chest, when he recognized with a static shock a photograph of Lily on the cover of the Bakersfield paper. She was sitting on the back steps at Norma’s Diner and she had a cigarette between two fingers and she looked just past the camera into the middle distance with her most resolute expression writ large across her narrow face. She must have been on her break as she had let her shoulders and her lips fall into a sort of full-body frown, and she had taken off her apron, and she had undone one of the buttons on her plaid work shirt in the heat, and her hair was sticking across her face with the breeze and her sweat. 

Against his better judgement and spendthrift nature he bought the paper, and he went outside into the cool evening and unfolded it against the warm hood of the car only to find with a delayed surprise that there was a photograph of himself below the fold. He looked haggard and wary the way he often did when he caught sight of himself in the glass windows in town and in the car’s mirrors when he shaved, but he was nearly smiling, though there was something nervous about it, and he remembered with a jolt what Sirius had said, about their hopefulness… 

He had not thought it could be true, even then, especially now. Soon there would be no more fieldwork, and it would be winter. They had saved some of their wages they kept in an envelope in the glove compartment of the car but there would be no telling if it would be enough to get them through. 

And yet it was in their faces in the pictures. A conviction to a better possibility. They had been captured, he realized, the both of them, with such limitless affection. Carefully, slowly, he covered his mouth with his hand, like to keep himself from making a sound. Then he read the caption: 

_Remus and Lily Lupin are a young couple from Tulsa, Oklahoma, who until April were trying their luck as tenant farmers in Dallam County Texas. Following the dust storms of Black Sunday they sold the last of their wedding gifts for gas money and drove to Pixley, California, where they live in a makeshift camp with about sixty or seventy other migrant families and no fresh water. Remus works in the fields picking vegetables from first light until it’s too dark to work, and Lily works about the same hours as a waitress at Norma’s Diner in Tipton. When these photographs were taken it was around one hundred degrees in the shade even at dinnertime._

_You’d hardly be able to tell all Remus and Lily have lived through without getting to know them, because of their extraordinary dignity._

_— Sirius Black, Farm Security Administration Photographer_

He read the caption again and again. It said almost nothing, he was trying to tell himself, almost nothing at all, vacant bullshit platitudes designed to evince sympathy in the form of funds and forfeitures, but then he looked at the photographs again, and he had to get in the car and press the heels of his hands into his eyes to keep from weeping. 

_I see you_ , he could hear Sirius say. It felt sometimes like he’d lived a thousand fucking years in a couple months. He rested his forehead against the steering wheel and closed his eyes and swallowed the burning dry thing in his throat. The monstrous dust. _I see you — it doesn’t matter_. 

After a little while he pulled himself together and drove back to camp. When he got there the sun was almost fully set but there were a few trucks bearing FSA logos at the makeshift pulloff, floodlights bathing the tents and the occupants and their squalid firepits in interrogative bleached-out color. To the West the sun had caught gold in the hills. 

Lily was at their tent watching the commotion with her arms folded over her chest. She was wearing her old cranberry-colored wool cardigan with the holes in the elbows and in the strange light her eyes were far away. 

“There’s biscuits,” she said when she saw him. 

“Did you see the paper?” 

“I haven’t. Why would I see the paper?” Then she said, “Have you been crying?” 

It was hardly a question, so he didn’t answer it. “What all’s going on?” 

She smiled the broad bright toothy smile she saved and saved and saved and hardly spent, and she clasped his shoulder. “They’ve come to see about the water.” 

**Author's Note:**

> if you liked this story, please consider a donation to the [national immigrant justice center](http://www.immigrantjustice.org/) in honor of this story's patron, mayamar. and/or, in honor of those displaced by the dustbowl in the '30s whose struggles americans have evidently forgotten about entirely in less than a century, consider a donation to the [international rescue committee](https://help.rescue.org/donate/refugees-need-urgent-support?ms=gs_ppc_onex_inaug17_es_170112&initialms=gs_ppc_onex_inaug17_es_170112&gclid=CLrfpZK19dECFd1WDQodkqoHwA) in support of migrants and refugees.   
> i have tried to keep everything in this story as accurately historical as possible but please feel free to call me out if i've gotten anything wrong. i also haven't read the grapes of wrath (sorry / whoops) which felt like a glaring omission as i was writing this. i'm here on [tumblr](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/).   
> [this](https://irmavepirmavep.bandcamp.com/album/no-handshake-blues) is what i listened to while i wrote this.


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